Complex factors guide heritage preservation for city buildings

By Ry Clarke - Lethbridge Herald Local Journalism Initiative Reporter on January 7, 2023.

Herald file photo The Bowman is a provincial historic designated building and is one of a number of buildings in Lethbridge with heritage value.

Heritage buildings, properly preserved and maintained, can be a living example of history for their respective communities.

Back for 2023, the Southern Alberta Council on Public Affairs hosted its first session of the new year with Ross Kilgour, senior community planner with the City of Lethbridge, and George Kuhl, chair of the Historic Places Advisory Committee.

Both guests spoke to audiences about the importance of historical buildings, how the city’s Heritage Program works, and how the upcoming new Heritage Management Plan will change things.

“There is often mistakes made between what is history, what is historic, and what is heritage. We want to make some of those distinctions,” said Kuhl. “There’s real value in recognizing the historic roots of a community and a lot of that is expressed in the buildings that we have. There’s a general perception, I think in society, that new is better than old, and replace, instead of adaptive reuse. It’s a challenge to that kind of paradigm in terms of what we’re actually trying to do.”

Looking to enlighten the discussion with upcoming news, the duo teased the expansion to the city’s Heritage Management Plan.

“The City of Lethbridge has a Heritage Management Plan currently from 2007,” said Kilgour. “The project we are doing right now is to update that and expand it to include Indigenous heritage. Currently we don’t include Indigenous heritage in our Heritage Program. The Municipal Development Plan gave us direction to rectify that, and that has been a really interesting project over the past couple of years working with the Nations and the Metis on how we can collaborate with them and partner on protecting their heritage sites within Lethbridge.”

Kilgour notes the plan will go to the public in the next couple of weeks for their comments, and then go before City Council for approval. Once in place, they can start working to protect Indigenous sites within the city.

Speaking towards importance, the two spoke about the reason behind preserving historical buildings.

“It is important because you see changes in a community. A lot of times those changes are reflected in the buildings. Those are reflective of the economy of the time, and certainly reflective of the economy now as well. There is often a conflict between do we save the building or do we tear it down and build a new building? When you look at the balance between social, economic, and environmental values, there is often a clash between those,” said Kuhl.

“Look at Fort Macleod, see how preserving their main street has really benefited their economy with all the film shoots and everything that happened there. There can be big economic benefits as well to heritage preservation,” added Kilgour.

Classification is key to preserving heritage buildings, but other factors are also at play. “The two main things that we look for are significance and integrity,” said Kilgour. “It has to have historic significance, which could be association with an important person like Lethbridge’s first mayor. Or it could be the architectural style. Then it has got to have integrity, if that house has been renovated, cut right back to the studs, and there is very little left of the original fabric that means it probably doesn’t have enough integrity left to warrant designation.”

Educating audiences on how history is preserved in the very structure of our city, the talk sparked interest and insights into Lethbridge’s rich history.

“We are trying to raise awareness about the value of heritage in the city,” said Kuhl. “If there are landlords out there who are interested in possibly having their property designated, then we’d certainly like to talk to them.”